‘Rejection of Trump’: 1 in 5 Indiana GOP voters cast their ballot for Nikki Haley

Nikki Haley dropped out of the 2024 presidential race exactly two months ago, and yet on Tuesday 128,000 Indiana GOP primary voters cast their ballot for the former Trump UN Ambassador instead of the presumptive Republican nominee.

"Unexpected warning signs for Trump in busy Indiana primary," reports Politico, which notes, "Nikki Haley’s performance in the already concluded presidential race could be a sign of trouble for Trump in more competitive states."

Haley, also a former South Carolina governor, was consistently getting double-digit percentages of the GOP primary vote before she dropped out of the race, even in red states. (All vote totals and percentages are from the Associated Press via Google and are current as of time of publication.)

In Alabama, Haley took 13%. In Oklahoma, 15.9%. In Texas, 17.4%. Tennessee, 19.5%.

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But after Haley dropped out, effectively handing Trump the nomination, Republican primary voters continued to vote for her, and continued to vote for her almost always in double-digit percentages.

In Arizona, Haley won 17.8% of the primary vote. In Georgia, 13.2%. In Kansas, 16.1%.

And last night in Indiana, Haley took 21.7% of the vote.

It's not just solidly "red" states.

In New Hampshire, Haley won a whopping 43.2% 0f the GOP primary vote.

Tuesday night as the Indiana results were still coming in but pretty much solidified, David Nir, publisher of Daily Kos Elections, asked, "Is Nikki Haley getting *more* popular? Right now, she's at 21.6% in Indiana with more than 70% reporting. If it holds, that would be her best showing since dropping out after Super Tuesday."

Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, replied, "No. It doesn’t have much at all to do with Nikki Haley. It’s that the broadest coalition in American politics is the anti-Trump coalition."

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Amanda Carpenter, a Republican political commentator who once worked for far-right GOP lawmakers including Senators Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint, agrees with the anti-Trump theory.

"It’s almost as if…more and more Republicans, each day, are rejecting Trump. Perhaps these [Indiana] voters heard what their former congressman and Governor and later Vice President Mike Pence had to say about the president he served?" she wrote. "In all seriousness though, this is not a Nikki Haley movement showing up in double digits in multiple states. It’s anti-Trump GOP voters. Can you hear them yet? This is real."

The New York Times last month took a look at what is called the "zombie vote," votes for candidates who have already dropped out.

According to the Times, the "zombie vote in this year’s Republican primary has actually been low by historical standards. In Democratic and Republican primaries going back to 2000, roughly a quarter of voters picked a candidate other than the eventual nominee even after all the other serious contenders had exited the race."

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"For Mr. Trump," the Times adds, "what matters is how many of Ms. Haley’s primary voters will rally behind him come November. Polls have shown that her supporters are likely to say they will vote for Mr. Biden. Even so, those same polls often find that many of those voters already supported Mr. Biden in 2020."

The Nation's John Nichols last month pointed to just that, after the Pennsylvania primary:

"Haley is not campaigning, but she just won almost 158,000 GOP primary votes in the critical state of Pennsylvania. Democrats think they can swing many of them to Biden."

Late Tuesday night, pointing to Haley taking more than a third of the vote in some Indiana counties, Nichols concluded, "These numbers continue a pattern of rejection of Donald Trump by precisely the Republicans and Republican-leaning independents he needs in November."